


Difficult

by SterlingBeryl



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, It's not THAT kind of relationship, Not the same Lucina and he knows it, What Lucina has is like childhood crush, What Robin has is just sadness, and lucina just looks a lot like her, and pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-09-29 15:54:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20438606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SterlingBeryl/pseuds/SterlingBeryl
Summary: Lucina returns to her own world, and Robin has to deal with the child that looks like her, but isn't her.





	1. Chapter 1

Its a ball. Its a beautiful ball. 

It’s a little lackluster compared to last week’s, a girl thinks to herself. 

She’s standing by herself, in the corner, by the drapes. She has friends here, but the romance of being silent and alone was too much to resist. She fancies herself an observer, and her eyes slide over the crowd, and the laughing lips, and moving bodies. 

There’s a man. He’s a bit older than she is. Dressed as smartly and looking as pretty as all the other men in the room. And her gaze slides over him just as he catches her looking, all the way from across the golden room. 

He winks.

The girl flushes and a dreadful light expands within her chest. She feels like coughing and hurries from the room. The man is talking to the person next to him. 

The girl finds the nearest drapes in the next room over and pats her chest. She’s only twelve. She coughs lightly and yells into her fist to relieve the pressure. When she recovers she retreats to the safety of her chattering friends. 

It’s an awakening, of a kind. 

~

Her father came back from across the sea. The ball last night was held in celebration of his return, she realises, as she giddily is swept up into his embrace. Her father tickles her and turns to embrace her brother. 

Its the next day, and last night’s glimmering spectacle fades like a dream. She recalls the people that fade in and out of the crowd, her own scratchy dress laced up to the throat, the giant chandeliers hanging stolidly above highly decorated heads. 

Her father moves sideways, and she suddenly remembers there was a man too. 

The man behind her father starts, and his face freezes as though he too, remembers something unpleasant. He turns and whispers to her father. She catches the words, which are soft as if telling a secret but loud because she is a child. ‘Please stop me from drinking more than three glasses next time.’

He addresses her standing instead of bending down, which she appreciates. 

‘Hello Luci, I don’t think you remember me, but I’m Robin.’ There’s soft embarrassment lingering in the corners of his smile. 

Her father pats her on the head. ’He’s my head tactician, Lucina. When you were half as tall as you are now, you used to ask him to carry you around the halls.’ 

She seems to remember. There was a robed man who liked to smile, and would pick her up and run away when she caused trouble. But he disappeared. She couldn’t find him though she roamed the palace every day for a week, convinced that it was his idea of an elaborate game of hide and seek. 

‘Where did you go?’ She asks, curious. 

‘Vacation.’ The practiced joke lilted at his lips. 

‘Where to?’ 

‘Everywhere. It was very healing.’ He laughs, but she gets the feeling he was being serious. 

‘Why?’ 

‘Because I wanted to.’ The words are petulant, and are offered casually. The answer stings. 

Her father crouches down. ‘Doesn’t matter, does it? He’s back now, and he’s agreed to give you lessons. Your lessons start next week. Now go off now, Robin and I have something to discuss.’ 

She catches the glance between Robin and her father. It feels like a warning. But to who? 

Inigo tugs at her sleeve and she lets herself be dashed away, though her head turns and her feet drags. 

~

Lucina isn’t a sullen child. She knows that she isn’t. It’s just that she is serious, more serious than her brother, who grows ever more ridiculous as she grows ever more mature. 

No, what Inigo has is charm. What she has is the ability to make Chrom look embarrassed and apologise on her behalf to people. They don’t outright say what’s on their mind. She just knows that’s what they are thinking when they comment on her hair, or her height, or her resemblance to her father, just anything but her personality. 

She knows what makes her happy, and it isn’t a stuffy room of adults that don’t know when to stop talking. 

She secretly waits for the day she outgrows her awkward limbs and gangly being, and her silence can finally be interpreted as a virtue. Maybe she could be as pretty as her mother someday. 

Or as handsome as her father. That’s what Robin says anyway, that she is handsome, like her father, only better because her father is an incorrigible rogue masquerading as a prince. And she would glare at him for that comment and he would laugh in response. 

Robin’s lessons make her happy. Robin treats her like an adult, treats her with the many items that he brings with him into battle. An iron sword today, a vulnerary the next, maybe a bow and one of his used tomes. She’s built up a small collection in her room. From time to time she flips through the dusty pages that are crisp and crackle with age, and she takes care with this book that she cannot read, that has pages full of unfamiliar markings she cannot understand. 

Once he showed her a seal he had used on himself. ’Don’t let your father know, Luci, he’ll have my hide if he thinks I’m teaching you to be a mage instead of a swordswoman.’ And he laughs again. 

Lucina is old enough now, and she senses that Robin is not a happy man.

~

One time, one of those few days when her father and mother had time to spare from their duties, they took Lucina and Inigo to a new pool they had built inside the castle walls. A surprise gift. Lucina knew how to swim, they had taught her from an early age since she must go shipfaring one day. 

She sank below the surface, feeling the lull of the water envelop her, feeling the deep coldness and serenity in its chill. She floated up when the pressure in her chest was too much. 

The first thing she saw when she broke the surface was Robin’s face of abject terror. A bit lower, was his body still half clambering over the stone barrier of the pool. 

He paused. Their eyes met. He backed down. 

Chrom had noticed his presence. ‘Robin, good man, take your clothes off before you get in! I don’t think anyone could swim in that heavy coat of yours.’

Lucina stared at Robin. The man was clearly flustered. He tilted his head and furrowed his brow. ‘Luci, I- um, ah, I didn’t know you could swim.’ 

‘I most definitely can.’ She spins in a circle, treading water. She looks up and Robin is already wandering off.

‘I guess she never had the chance to learn.’ She hears the words that Robin mutters in a half-daze, and wonders. 

~

‘You want to try magic?’ She is given a look of befuddlement rather than Robin’s usually easy demeanour. It had been three years since their first lesson, and since then Robin had expanded from tactics to include history, and geography, and simple potions, and botany. She’d rather spend the day with him than go to school (that her mother had insisted she attend).

‘I don’t see why not,’ he continues, running his hand through messy white hair. ‘I can start you off on the most basic, Elfire, maybe, that’s what Ylissean mages start off on, isn’t it? Since Lissa is a healer, you can probably use magic as well. It’s an entirely different skill set though, Luci. I think I better ask your father.’ 

Lucina thinks that Robin asks her father about too much. ‘I want to see you fight. With magic.’ 

Robin brightens immediately. ‘I can certainly do that. How about this, you ask your father to take you with the next shepherds outing, and after that I’ll suggest to him that it’s high time Luci had some real experience. The road would be a nice change of pace for me too.’

It turns into a conversation in the tactics room the next day. Recently Lucina had been told to attend, to sit and listen to the going-ons. It wasn’t as boring as she thought it would be. Robin was always there. 

Same old Robin, just a little more animated, occupied, eloquent, and free. She wishes he were like this in their lessons. More and more she gets the feeling that he controls himself with a practiced ease. 

‘Would you like to go with us, Lucina?’ Her father asks her, and the people surrounding the table look her way. 

She nods. The people settle back with satisfied looks. 

It doesn’t matter where, or how long, or what for they’re going. She just wants to go. 

‘Raiders are not an easy lot. They fear the order of the capital, so they roam about on the outskirts of the Ylissedom.’ Frederick says, breaking down the bulk of their conversation into bitesize pieces. ‘Simply reaching the area affected could take about a month. A month on the road, A month we spend there, a month going back. Are you sure, my lady?’ 

‘Don’t call me that.’ Comes her ready answer, and Robin laughs. ’She’s sure.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Robin is not a creep. He's just drunk and missing someone.


	2. On the Road

The road is in fact, very hard. Lucina has a hard time adjusting. They were barely a week away from the capital, and Lucina already feels like her bones are shaken a little too loose from the constant riding. It’s still nice to get away from the city, but by now the trip feels a little less adventure, and a little more repetitive countryside. 

Lucina sits down on a tree root as the adults bicker about the way to go. At least, her mother came with the group, a decision her father disapproves of and Robin seems to look on with amusement. 

Robin comes over, a boy in tow. Lucina brightens and stands. 

The child is Marc, Robin’s young son. Though a few years younger than Lucina, he had been around the castle for as long as she could remember. When not in lessons, or in the tactics room, Lucina can’t seem to recall a time when Marc and Robin were apart. 

As far as she could tell, from whispers and shaking heads, nothing anyone could do could convince Robin to leave Marc behind in the safety of the capital. 

Lucina remembers a time when she thought Marc was her second brother. His hair was the exact same color as hers. 

Marc bounds over to Lucina, smiling up at her. ‘Hi Luci! I brought you bread.’ He offers a fistful of bread wrapped in cloth

Lucina glances at Robin, then says, ‘It’s alright Marc, I still have some left.’ Marc promptly stuffs the rest of the bread in his mouth, and plops down on the tree root next to her. He flips open a book and his eyes never waver from the page. 

‘Don’t you want to help Chrom? He’s trying to figure out the map.’ Robin asks. 

‘Why aren’t you helping him?’ Lucina asks in response. 

‘They chased me away, said it wasn’t any fun with me there. Chrom said the exercise would be good for them.’ He chuckles, and Lucina welcomes the sound. ‘So I’ll spend this time with my favorite son and my favorite student.’ 

Marc looks up and beams. 

~

Her father joins them that night, as well as her mother, who brings with her a bundle of blankets. The night is cold despite the fire, and Lucina is enjoying the warmth of huddling next to Marc and Robin. 

Her mother hands her a blanket, and Lucina tucks one half around her, another half around Marc. Chrom forcefully drapes another blanket around Robin’s protesting shoulders. 

‘How did it go without me?’ Robin asks, clutching the blanket begrudgingly tighter. 

Her father laughs out. ‘I think we managed. Do tell us when we go too far off course.’ 

‘I certainly will. We can’t have our shepherd misleading his flock, can we now? Perhaps let Luci and Marc take a shot at it tomorrow.’ He turns and wraps an arm around them. ‘I bet my prized students will figure it out earlier than you.’ Lucina glows with the praise. 

‘You should tutor me as well.’ 

‘I am teaching you, every minute of every day. It’s not my fault you can't keep up with two children.’ Robin japes easily at Chrom’s expense. 

‘Maybe you show too much favoritism.’ Chrom retaliates. The words are accusatory, but the tone is jovial. 

Olivia gently puts another blanket around Lucina, removing Robin’s arm in the process. Lucina falls asleep in her mother’s lap, waking the next morning to her father’s teasing and Robin’s tight-lipped smile. 

~ 

There are no problems with the road the next day. Not because the other shepherds actually did well, but because they realise they had travelled here before. More than fifteen years ago. 

‘I know you’d be alright. What would our exalt do if he couldn’t handle a little map reading?’ Robin teases easily. He was sharing a horse with Marc, who was somehow still reading with absolute concentration between Robin’s jostling arms. ‘Don’t read on the horse Marc, I won’t pick you up if you fall.’

‘One of these days, I’ll make you regret all you’ve said during one of our sparring sessions.’ Chrom yells at him from in front.

‘Oh dear. I guess I’ll just have to let Luci protect me. You will favor me over your father, won’t you, Luci?’ Robin turns in his horse to look at Lucina, who was riding behind Chrom. 

Lucina was a proud, enthusiastic, and habitual supporter of her father, and she knew it. She always vehemently opposed anything anyone said against her father, and was up for fighting with anyone who insulted his honor. Nothing, not even that said in jest, was acceptable, and Robin knew that. He used it to rile her up and tease her for it. 

Just this once. She’d like to see Robin at a loss. 

‘Certainly. I’ll fight by your side.’ She loads the words with false sincerity, but this ability is unpracticed and falls short. 

Robin’s eyes flash and widen up in shock, and in a move that may or may not be intentional, his legs squeeze the horse’s sides and the horse flies off into the distance, amidst whinnying and peals of Marc’s laughter. 

Olivia is silent. Chrom laughs until he nearly falls off his horse. ‘Well done, Lucina! You may yet find a way to restrain that man. Naga knows I never could.’

Somehow, Lucina doesn’t feel like laughing. 

~

The shepherds find and stop in a village for the night. Lucina sighs as she sinks into the heated bathwater, a luxury she had not had for two weeks. 

Lulled by the warmth of the water, she thinks back these past two weeks, and the thoughts that mill about in her head in the day consolidate and coalesce with certainty. 

Robin was different on the road. Especially now, in familiar country. 

In Ylisstol, she never had the chance to see him at night, as all their lessons took part in the day, and by night he would retreat to his room in the castle to be with Marc, or retreat to the cottage he owned in the woods and insisted on maintaining, despite Chrom’s entreaties for him to live in the castle permanently. 

As the skies darken, and the pinks, purples and pale oranges spill and falter across the sky, Robin grows quiet, and ultimately silent. It is an unnatural silence, and when he falls into this open-eyed stupor, no one in the company has the courage to broach it, besides Chrom, Lon’qu (who is not so much brave as insensitive), and Marc himself. 

Lucina guessed that it had something to do with Marc’s mother. She didn’t dare ask Robin for fear of what he might say, but she did ask Marc once. 

‘Do you have a mother?’ She asked.

Marc frowns, and after careful deliberation says with absolute certainty, ‘Aunt Lissa Mama, Uncle Chrom Papa.’ 

To be fair, Marc was like one at the time. 

~

It’s the next day. Lon’qu rides up next to Robin, who greets him with a warm smile. As the horses jostle them, Lon’qu leans in and says something, to which Robin laughs out loud. The current company, Lucina included, is incredibly befuddled. Robin does not laugh easy, and Lon’qu is not exactly the jokester. 

Lucina remembers Lon’qu as one of her mother’s oldest friends. She would play with Inigo, as her mother and Lon’qu talk about Ferox, talk about going back to visit, such as perhaps-chrom-could-organise-a-visit, and sometimes he-would-love-for-you-to-go-too. 

They never went though. Mother said that both Chrom and Lon’qu were waiting for someone to come back. 

They finally reached their destination that day. Lucina is adept at pitching her own tent now, and it’s only a matter of minutes before she goes to help Marc with his. 

Robin’s tent is already well done, and she remembers that she had finished the book that Robin set her as on-the-road reading. She makes to duck under the tent but is practically knocked aside by Lon’qu who virtually flies out of the tent, stumbles, and is hit in the head by an ensuing fruit. A fig. 

There is muffled laughter coming from inside the tent, which becomes clear and loud as Robin ducks out of the tent. He sees Lucina. His entire body freezes and his face contorts. 

It should have been a charming moment. It should be where Lucina laughs and runs off to tell Chrom what on earth Robin gets up to in his spare time. But the look on Robin’s face suggests that he had been caught doing something wrong, by the last person on earth he wanted to see. 

Lucina opens her mouth. She closes it. 

She tries again, for all their sakes. It’s hard, because there is a lump in her chest and it’s terribly hard to breathe. 

‘I just wanted a new book. I...finished the last one.’ 

Robin restarts. ‘Oh! Yes! That I can do! Lon’qu, just wait!’ He dives back into his tent. Lon’qu is already striding away by the time Lucina turns to him. 

Robin hands Lucina a new book. He looks nonchalantly in the direction of Lon’qu who has already gone very very far. ‘There now. Do you need anything else?’ 

Lucina shakes her head. The motion feels unnatural. 

‘I should stop fooling around, and go see your father about something. There’s no need to push yourself too much Luci,’ He adds, as an afterthought. ‘We are on the road after all. Enjoy yourself and the country as best you could. There’s plenty to read back in the capital, alright?’ 

There are shouts. Loud, terrified shouts in the distance. 

The shepherds are all running out of their tents and corralling towards Chrom, who is looking rather grim and shouting ‘Get ready!’, ‘Hurry up!’ and ‘They’re here!’ 

The raiders had found their campsite. 

~

‘Lucina, stay with Robin. Robin, stay back and keep the children safe.’ 

‘I can fight too!’ 

‘No, Luci, this isn’t what we expected.’ Robin’s eyes are narrowed. ‘The raiders seemed to have anticipated our arrival. Probably knew we were coming. They hired better mercenaries. The mercenaries are a little tougher than you can handle and we don’t know what they are capable of so please,’ He finishes in one breath, ‘Stay back with Marc, and we can help them with tactics instead of sharp pointy things.’ 

Lon’qu is right there by Robin’s side, expressionless as always. Robin doesn’t question his presence.

But as the battle drags on, Robin’s expression hardens further, and the small group changes their position and inches closer to the heat of battle. Finally, he sends Lon’qu in, and Lon’qu seems to want to disobey his order, but goes nonetheless. He ambushes from the left, and the battle seems to balance out a fair bit. 

‘It’s going to be alright.’ She hears from above her. 

‘Lucina, on your right!’ Marc cries out in fear. 

A flash. Lucina blocks. An arrow clatters to the ground, clanging from the impact with her sword. Another one, this time blocked by a flash of magic, that explodes several feet in front of her and continues in a line towards the bushes from which the arrows came from. A man, face darkened by ash and smoke, sputters and coughs as he crawls from the bush. 

‘A sneak attack. How crude.’ Robin floats down from his midair position, places an arm around her. ‘You did well, Luci.’ 

Lucina watches Robin drag fingers through dirt-streaked white hair, a grimace lodged painfully on his glistening face, the hard, deep lines of determination and challenge pulled tight on his face. 

She can only focus on the weight of his hand under her shoulder blade, steadying her. She stares up at his eyes that flash in the intensity of battle. 

She thinks that she probably feels a little more than she should. Her heart’s beating out of her chest. In fear?

No, she definitely feels something she shouldn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Male Robin has a male son :) because its fanfiction. Decided that Lon'qu is going to be THE ONE.


End file.
